FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Whether it was blue-on-blue remains to be seen, but blue-on-blue is much, much easier to deal with than red/blue.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
the modal reality "politics in a multi-party democracy" and "rule of law" are meant to evoke is one where hard limits on the scope and scale of political conflict exist and are respected, and where law is capable of settling conflicts. That is not the world we are living in.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Can war be avoided, can any side triumph without vast bloodshed, can compromises be negotiated, can assurances be made?
Separation. Erode federal power, establish common knowledge that federal power should not be enforced or respected. That's the best possible use of power, and even that is Russian roulette.
On an individual level, allow the Sort to run its course, cooperate with it if possible. If you live in the wrong place, move. That's just common sense.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
Please do, I am frequently compelled to do the same and understand completely.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
Pinging @Stellula, as it may be relevant to their interests.
I said that it was transactional. I didn't say it was purely transactional. There's a difference.
Can you name a type of human interaction that is not "transactional" in some way? If I talk to a stranger, is that not in some sense transactional? When I catch some random family's baby staring at me in the grocery store and begin making silly faces to try to get them to laugh, is that not clearly "transactional"? When I have lunch together with a friend, is that not transactional in some sense?
You seem to be claiming that there's the set of human interactions, and then a subset of transactional human interactions, and then a sub-subset of purely transactional human interactions. But if in fact all human interaction is transactional, and then a subset is purely transactional, then the "transactional" label adds nothing meaningful to the term "interaction", and the joint in reality is the "purely", the compartmentalization and formalization of an interaction, and with it the exclusion and severing of other possible connections and relations and interactions. We "transact" because we wish for more interaction with someone, and the "more" is open-ended. We "purely transact" with someone because we want a specific interaction and no more. These two modes of transaction are notably distinct.
If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person.
Perhaps, if we confine ourselves to abstractions, though I'm skeptical that this is actually an accurate description at the object level.
But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either.
I would not agree with this formulation, so far as I understand the argument; it seems to be a false dichotomy emerging excessive abstraction. The dichotomy is drawn between the instrumental "I love them for the characteristics they possess" and the arbitrary "I love them for for some ineffable, arbitrary themness", but there is a third option: "I love them because I have loved them." In this, the instrumental emerges from and utterly overtakes the arbitrary, while being inextricable from it.
Put a grain of sand into an oyster and wait, and the result often enough is a pearl. Pearls do not form without the grain of sand, but pearls are not themselves reducible to grains of sand. They are an accretion, a composite, of which the sand is a foundation but of which the foundation is far, far less than what is built upon it, like an inverted pyramid. One might describe them better as an investment.
My relationship with my wife began in a quite arbitrary fashion; having been acquaintances for a few years, we spent some time together at a church event and hit it off over a common love for movies, books and video games. On the other hand, this arbitrariness was only possible from an explicitly-instrumental foundation: we found each other because we were both actively looking for a sane, stable, committed Christian of the opposite sex to build a family with, and also there was some amount of behind-the-scenes matchmaking from mutual friends nudging things along.
The love we share now does not rest significantly on our common love for movies, books and video games. Nor is it based solely the instrumental desire for marriage and a family; we no longer want marriage in the abstract, we want this marriage, and our love were persist even if we were unable to have children. What it rests on is nearly a decade of choices made and actions taken out of love for one another: in-jokes, acts of kindness, acts of service, shared hardship, shared joy, shared knowledge, and so on and on. Further, these have accrued because neither of us acted as though these were "purely transactional", nor did transactionality enter the calculus in any significant way; we do the things we do because each of us perceive that such acts will please and support the other. I want my wife to be happy and to have a good life, and she wants the same for me, and the longer these objectives guide our actions the more solid and substantial our love grows, and the less we recognize a good apart from the good found in each other.
The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.
This appears to me to be sophistry through a retreat to arbitrary abstraction.
And yet I will show you the most excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
What does that definition mistakenly contain that we might better remove? What does that definition lack that we might wish to add? It tells us that love is a terminal value, and it defines that love is and is not. In what way is any of this "unsayable"?
I occasionally become impatient with people who glibly assert that they are "in love" without realizing that they are uttering an absurdity (or without realizing that, statistically speaking, their relationship probably won't last the year).
I share this impatience, because such people are generally not describing Love but infatuation.
To assume that we know love when we feel it is presumptuous. We can always interrogate whether any emotion, action, or other particular entity is an instantiation of the general concept of love, whether the conditions of instantiation of love can ever be met at all, etc.
Just so. But equally, to claim that we do not know love when we have practiced it as an intentional way of life is sophistry. Certainly not all questions have answers, but just as certainly some questions do have answers, and this is one of them. Why ask questions if you don't want answers?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" shouldn't be taken to entail anything more than what it says on the tin.
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" is a claim that the exchange of resources for sex is the central feature of the relationship. It is true that marriage relationships involve both sex and the sharing (as distinct from exchanging!) of resources; they also involve a great many other acts and features: emotional intimacy, emotional support, the bearing and rearing of children, companionship, emotional and physical labor, cooperation, negotiation, and on and on; most forms of positive human interaction would either be included or approached by a complete list. What you are doing is to take two items from a very long list, and claim that these two items and their interrelation are central, and all else is peripheral. To say that this elides more than it reveals is a notable understatement.
Another concrete example: Parenting involves exercising total control over a human, while also providing for their physical needs. These two features are the essence of both slavery and imprisonment; therefore, parenting/slavery/imprisonment is basically just slavery/imprisonment/parenting.
One can play this particular game with any form of complex human interaction. Selectively ignoring and exaggerating the aspects and interrelations of any two forms of interaction allows one to claim that anything is like anything, but sophistry provides no actual insight, only the illusion of insight.
As I argued in another post, I don't think that the deficiency of prostitution (deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever the claim is) entails the moral blameworthiness of prostitution.
From a strict materialist perspective, it seems the chain of argument starts with noticing that these two modes of interaction appear to be mutually exclusive, and quite stubbornly so, and then note that one is very obviously more conducive to human flourishing than the other. It's really no different from materialist arguments against drug addiction, wireheading, or other forms of degenerate hedonism. If you yourself admit that prostitution is deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever relative to marriage and you recognize that prostitution and marriage appear to be mutually incompatible, then prostitution is worse in concrete terms, and in the abstract the situation is improved with less prostitution and more marriage, all the way up to no prostitution and all marriage. Why, from a strictly materialist perspective, should we encourage or even accept the worse state, rather than pushing people as hard as we can toward the better? Maybe that pushing grows counterproductive at some point, quite likely there's a level of coercion where the juice isn't worth the squeeze, but again, the same is true for all the other degenerate forms of hedonism, defection, and bad tradeoff behavior. We live in a society, as they say.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The American identity survives regardless of who makes up our population.
Can you offer a description of this "American Identity"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
"You have sullied your hands with filthy parchments of heresy, guardsman. How do you plead?"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Who is this person? I've never heard of them before.
It's pretty close to how it goes.
No, it is not.
As I have experienced it, marriage is almost a perfect inversion of my thankfully-secondhand understanding of prostitution. My relationship to my wife is not commodified, it is not compartmentalized, it impacts every decision I make each day in a significant way. In the sense that engaging a Prostitute is a discrete choice, my marriage is much less of a choice and much more of a consequence, an effect rather than a cause, leaning far more on path-dependence in a way that would be incoherent if applied to prostitution. You are attempting to fit something into a discrete box whose main feature is its inability to be discretely boxed, and then you are claiming that since everything outside the discrete box isn't inside the box, it can be safely ignored.
A concrete example: if we define "haggling" as "negotiation to maximize one's own benefit at the expense of one's opposite", then haggling's role in prostitution is straightforward and practical. And yet, in a proper marriage, there is no way to productively haggle, because your opposite's interest is your own interest. Most married men will grok the maxim "happy wife, happy life"; I am not aware of an equivalent formulation for prostitutes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
The weaponization of shame against your out group just leads to your out group being inoculated against all shame.
Long ago, a commenter discussing the Culture War claimed that Red Tribe needed to build a "independent status economy". The term stuck with me ever since, and is basically what you're describing here.
"Xianxai" is a genre of fiction centering on "Cultivators", martial-arts practitioners who develop various reality-bending superpowers by "cultivating" their chi, or mystical life-force. These stories tend to be produced in serial format, and are often very, very long, many hundreds of chapters for text versions being relatively common. Think Dragonball Z.
Cultivators generally congregate in "sects", communes dedicated to further developing and perfecting their particular method of cultivation and raising the power of the sect's members generally; these communes are usually depicted as rigidly hierarchical, and often mercilessly competitive and even grossly exploitative for those on the bottom of the hierarchy. Within a sect, someone lower on the hierarchy is one's "Junior", someone higher is one's "Senior". Seniors are often depicted intentionally stunting or interfering with their junior's training for various bad or even occasionally good reasons.
Cultivation takes a very long time, generally is depicted as passing through a long sequence of distinct levels and sub-levels demarcating significant increases in power. There's usually a pretty distinct tradeoff between slow, steady, diligent growth and rapid "get rich quick" growth that shoots up quick but plateaus early. The slow-and-steady growth is often referred to as "building one's foundation"; if you do this poorly you may grow quicker but plateau earlier, and the reverse might mean slower initial growth but much more capacity for growth.
The meme is portraying Xianxai fandom as recapitulating the medium; the "senior" (fan who has read tons of Xianxai) is misleading his "junior" (fan who has read less), claiming that he's read an extremely long work and that they should definitely read it as well. The story is "building it's foundation" and the quality pays off spectacularly 1400+ chapters in. In fact, the senior hasn't read a single page, but by the time the "junior" is in a position to assess the truth of this claim, it could be argued that they will certainly learn something from the experience, and perhaps will be Enlightened.
The specific context is that @self_made_human is claiming to have pulled this gambit in his previous recommendation of "Reverand Insanity", an extremely long and apparently quite polarizing Xianxai serial that's been discussed here in several previous reading recommendation discussions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I am not really the person to make the point, anyway. I saw @Hoffmeister25 make the point much better than I can, and if FCfromSSC had any satisfying response to it, he sure didn't seem to post it there.
The conversation continued here. @Hoffmeister has the last word there as well, as most people I engage with do. I have a lot less time for discourse than I used to, and on deeper subjects like this one, formulating replies can take awhile.
Not the person you asked, but I might be able to give an armchair perspective while you wait, because it's a question that interests me a lot.
In the real world, there is no minimap, there is no shared vision, and the terrain is orders of magnitude more complex than most games or even sims portray. You do not necessarily have a perfect or even particularly good idea of where you are, your idea of where your allies are and their idea of where you are is even worse, and the enemy's position is a complete unknown.
This would already be a pretty serious problem, but it is made much worse by the fact that real-world weapons have absurd effective range, penetration and killing power. This reality is greatly magnified for crew-served and mounted weapons, which are fantastic for inflicting what is known as a "mass-casualty event", a situation where multiple people go from effective combatants to dead or dying more or less instantly.
The combination of these two realities mean that it is extremely important to hide basically all the time. Hiding tends to degrade your situational awareness even more, and it's easy to end up with a worm's-eye-view of the world where you are effectively blind in all but a few very narrow sightlines.
Obviously that won't work for any sort of offensive, so you have to leave cover and move. But leaving cover means exposing yourself to an exponentially-increasing number of attack vectors. So you need to do this very, very slowly and very, very carefully, preferably in tight coordination with lots and lots of allies doing the same thing. But again, you probably have poor knowledge of each other's positions, so you need to be even more slow and careful, covering each other as you methodically work your way from cover to cover, clearing or maintaining watch on all the highest-value attack vectors. And often the way you discover the enemy's location is when some of you accidentally walk into a prepared ambush from cover, possibly by a heavy weapon.
The charge of the winged hussars, it ain't. it's more like four-dimensional minesweeper, plus the clearing numbers can lie, and you have to coordinate moves with five people, each of who has a different grid orientation. As @netstack mentioned, there's some games that actually try to simulate this sort of thing, but they tend to be very niche because very, very few gamers are actually interested in that particular flavor of masochism. You can get a small taste of it playing ARMA, that's probably one of the more accessible versions; even playing some of their goofy scenarios versus bots, it's easy to find yourself scrunched up against the back wall of some structure, panicking because you have no idea where the enemy is and you're pretty sure if you break cover you'll never see where the bullet came from. And that's baby's first easy mode, hide and seek against dumb bots carrying small arms.
So I am a little confused what you actually want if it's not "Assume everyone is in defect mode and loot what we can.
I am rejecting the Russell's Conjugation of "My entitlement spending is investing in the future of the American people, your entitlement spending is defection and looting." Notably, I'm rejecting it both ways, and precommitting to accept whichever half you or others prefer. If you believe that Entitlement/Defense spending has heretofore been defection and looting, than I am willing to agree that I am endorsing defection and looting of the exact sort that has been the bipartisan norm for my entire life. If you believe Entitlement/Defense spending has heretofore been investment in the future of the American people, then I agree that I am endorsing that my party should make such investments also. In neither case do I believe my faction should act unilaterally as the "adult in the room" who imposes hard-nosed, unpopular restraint on spending. The purse is common. Its benefits and costs should be common as well.
This is prompted by repeated claims here by a number of posters that MAGA should disapprove of Trump due to his fiscal irresponsibility and the fact that his budget bill results in considerable deficit spending. I understand that the Republican Party has previous held opposition to deficit spending as a shibboleth. The Republican Party has also held foreign interventionism as a shibboleth. Things change, and it seems to me that this change is preferable to the alternatives.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Because lots of government debt is bad, so less debt is good... Yes but the logical conclusion to this train of thought is that government should never do anything, lest it gets undone in a few years. That sounds like a fucking awful society.
The part you are failing to engage with is that "fiscal responsibility" is electorally unpopular, while "fiscal irresponsibility" is electorally popular. Implementing "fiscal responsibility" will obviously cost one political power, while implementing "fiscal responsibility" will obviously gain one political power. So long as this is the case, actual fiscal responsibility is not a possible outcome in any but the shortest of terms.
To the extent that this is fucking awful, I direct you to the litany of Tarsky.
This is true but again if this stance was held at all levels of power you're basically just advocating for anarchy?
No. I am positing that political power is a scarce resource, and it should be used where it plausibly might deliver positive results. "Fiscal Responsibility" fails that test. If you don't like that fact, well, legibly admitting that it is a fact might just be the first step to changing it.
Western nations have gotten pretty cooked, but seriously man you should consider therapy or something because your outlook is profoundly nihilistic, pessimistic, and defeatist.
Aiming to secure what value might be gained under the conditions that observably exist is not nihilism, pessimism or defeatism, but rather realism and applied rationality.
Because perpetual defecits that exceed GDP growth eventually lead to massive inflation, economic collapse, or both? This is bad.
Does the Democratic party agree? What's their plan for solving this problem? Is that plan realistic?
Kind of? You're incredibly negative and myopic though, which is a lens you are viewing reality through.
Perhaps. Can you lay out an equally-realistic assessment that's less myopic and more positive?
It's not, but I think the deficits feel worse coming from them, hence the focus. They did love going absolutely ape shit over any/all democrat spending during the 2000s/2010s, so it feels hypocritical.
Yes, and we also spearheaded the GWOT, which added trillions to the debt. But notably, we have since exiled the faction that spearheaded the GWOT, and are trying to an isolationism that is the best possible path to reduced defense spending.
Unfortunately not really, I'm honestly kind of worried about our societies inability to deal with anything, but if we give up then we go from "maybe fucked" to "definitely fucked" and I don't see that as an improvement.
Alternatively, maybe making it clear that the Republican Party does not consider the debt to be a problem we're in charge of fixing will make it clear that someone else has to step up. Or else, we all accept that there is no fixing it, and at least we have the maximum warning possible that disaster is not, in fact, going to be avoided.
Unfortunately not really
Then your plan is that Republicans should sacrifice their scarce political power for nothing, correct? Why would you expect Republicans to do that willingly?
You have many harsh words for my perspective, and many admonitions for why I ought to think differently, but no actual corrections about what is, no more credible account of the realities actually facing us. It appears to me that you are objecting to me pointing out obvious facts about how things actually are, and would prefer that I argue based on fantasy. I decline to do so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
The Republicans haven't been the party of "fiscal responsibility" any more than the Democrats have been the party of the working class in living memory.
I know. I said as much.
Are you just making a somewhat sardonic argument for accelerationism ("we should just loot the treasury since that's what everyone does when they're in power?")
The way you are framing the issue here is illuminating of my point, I think. I did not use the word "looting". Do you personally recognize entitlement spending as "looting" in other contexts? Does the Democratic party generally? I appreciate that many Republicans have considered entitlement spending as "looting", but why should the party as a whole do so now? Why not argue that the Democrats were right, that government spending is good, and make our own case for the best way to do it? Nor would this be pure cynical posturing. The SLS is a national disgrace in terms of achieving the goals the money was earmarked for. In terms of maintaining some sort of "productive" economic activity in a number of geographically-dispersed communities around the country, maybe it's actually the best of a bad set of options? And if not, under what principles, and who are these principles supposed to be championed by? To the extent that "Entitlement spending is looting" is a case that needs to be made, why not openly invite others to make it by legibly abandoning the position oneself? My party actually spearheaded the GWOT, and a lot of the current tumult is us making a serious effort to strip power from those members of our faction responsible. It is not guaranteed that this will actually resolve the problem, but it's something, isn't it?
In any case, whichever angle one chooses to approach the problem from, it seems unlikely to me that the old shibboleths are productive here.
Every other "budget-cutting measure" (including and especially DOGE) is just theatrics.
From my perspective, DOGE's value comes from it attacking Progressive patronage networks that turn federal tax dollars into progressive political influence, with secondary purposes of normalizing the idea of disruption of disruptive reorganization of sclerotic federal bureaucracy. It actually balancing the budget appears to be a novel political tactic called "lying". It will be interesting to see how this new technique alters our political landscape now that its usefulness has been demonstrated.
The actual solution to the debt is what we've discussed many times: entitlements and defense spending, both of which are regarded as more or less untouchable.
This could actually be a very good time to cut defense spending drastically, provided we can be pretty sure we won't have to fight a war in, say, the next decade. An unknown but likely very large percentage of our current equipment is pretty clearly now obsolete, and the new paradigm has not solidified. Until it does solidify, it seems to me very likely that most military spending will be pure waste. Funding for Ukraine is, perversely, probably the exception, as it can at least be argued that it helps establish the new paradigm. One of the major downsides is that it appears to increase our risk of an actual war.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that, in my view, Defense spending should absolutely be as touchable as entitlement spending, maybe even more so.
Here we hear arguments for AGI saving us, or asteroid mining opening up a new frontier, or Modern Monetary Theory being real, all just variations on "Wish for a miracle." Or are we debating how much ruin is actually left in the nation and whether we or our children will outlive it?
Deus Ex Machina or Ruin do appear to be the likely outcomes, with one significantly likelier than the other. But more generally, the question is whether the tactics we've historically relied upon offer any real traction on these probabilities. Republicans have not, in fact, proved themselves capable of "fiscal responsibility" in any meaningful sense, and it seems at least arguable to me that pretending otherwise makes actual fiscal responsibility harder, not easier.
But you do make a compelling case that rather than hoping for actual economic reform even if it does mean I personally will see my retirement amount to less than it should have been, I should be selfish and just try to grab what I can and hope I'm dead before the shit really hits the fan. Sucks for the kids, though.
"We", surely. Looting individually is far less efficient; many hands make light work. But more generally, if this is the situation, what benefit is derived from pretending otherwise?
I mean, firstly, 'significant resources' is load-bearing here in a way that's difficult to falsify.
For Musk:
- Donating significant sums of money to anti-MAGA organizations or political campaigns
- Orchestrating a serious political campaign aimed at attacking MAGA politicians.
- Actually withdrawing SpaceX support from the Federal Government.
- Tilting the X/Twitter algorithm against MAGA.
- Successfully impeding passage of the "Big Beautiful Bill" through grassroots action.
For Trump:
- Deploy the federal executive agencies to go after Musk's businesses.
These all seem pretty falsifiable, and I'm sure we could come up with other metrics. In short, I'm waiting to see what actually happens beyond mean tweets, which seems to me to be a solid general rule. I note that this spat is resulting in Musk departing Washington... right about the time that it was announced that he would some time ago, and Congressional Democrats now publicly calling for the release of the Epstein files, which is something that I and most of Trump's base is in fact all for and Trump ran on.
What does it matter to you whether Trump cancels Elon's contracts or Elon doesn't show up for republicans next election?
My hope is that these men will actually be able to advance my tribe's interests in concrete ways. We're short on elite backing, so we've got to take what we can get, and if even what we get can't get their shit together, that bodes ill for us long-term.
Your coalition is the same, the people who vote for guns and the people who vote for abortion and the people who vote for whatever else will turn out in 2028.
I mean, it's pretty obviously not. The entire neocon wing and much of the corporate wing has defected to the democrats, and we've picked up a whole bunch of former centrist democrat and working-class types. And I think this is a very good thing; realignment and reshuffling of the power blocks gives potential for a break in the deadlock and stagnation, potential for some measure of actual positive change. You mention guns and abortion; the guns we're actually seeing a serious push on, and the abortion we aren't; Roe has been removed, but there's no actual drive for federal abortion restrictions, and I think that's quite likely a significant change from the past. From an overall factional perspective, at least, this seems like a good thing.
And the thing is, The Democrats could do the same, and maybe will after this latest loss. What we've been doing clearly isn't working, so stop pushing on a brick wall and find some way to actually deliver positive change in peoples' lives. If the parties can't do that, policy starvation proceeds and we're all in trouble.
Again, why? Obviously your leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional - how can you read what Elon and Trump are tweeting at each other and conclude anything else? Would you ever behave that way, let alone behave that way if you were representing a nation? They're just dysfunctional in ways that you or your 'faction' approves of.
If the angry twitter exchange is the limit of it, then it is undignified, not dysfunctional, and dignity was a value most of us were priced out of long ago. We can survive and potentially even thrive without dignified leaders. If the beef actually compromises the mission, then that's a very bad sign for the rest of this term. Again, my hope is that we get actual progress out of this mess. If they can't do that, then everything gets worse, the odds of a win for the current D establishment in 2028 go up pretty significantly, and that's not an optimistic timeline from where I'm sitting.
You should probably update on at least the stability of Elon.
Sad but likely true; I'm still stanning for him at the moment as he's still one of the very, very few examples of someone who's actually made things better in a material way. We need much more of that, not less.
Was this meant to link to a pop song? If so, the reference went over my head.
I've always been a fan of music videos, and my eldest likes to sit on my lap with my headphones on and listen to them. SIAMES has a good one she was listening to, and that vid popped up in the youtube recommendations this morning. Watch it if you have the time, and tell me what you see as the sociopolitical vibe the vid communicates.
You mentioned veiled threats. From my perspective, they are absolutely endemic, unavoidable, permeating every facet of our culture. I am served them organically several times a week, and so I am not surprised when I read about majorities of progressives approving of outright political murder. The last time we went round on this, you asked me where the violence was, the day before Luigi murdered a CEO. The result was broad social support for his actions from the left, up to the media posting stories about how attractive he is and how many supporters he has and doesn't he sorta have a point here, let's have a discussion about this.
I do not think we're going to see thinly-veiled minecraft references from the MAGA grassroots toward Musk. But if you care about thinly-veiled Minecraft references as a general class, there are a lot of them, and a notable amount of actual minecrafting, happening right now as we speak. The violence is getting worse. Public figures are endorsing and encouraging it. Common knowledge continues to accrue, on both sides.
where's the guy who was trying to address the address the hate in his heart with his pastor, or something like that?
If you're genuinely curious, see the discussion about distrust of emotion here. I am instructed to love my enemies. That does not stop them from being my enemies. Factions are a fact, differences in values are a fact. The question is what to do about it, and renouncing hate means turning away from many of the obvious and easy answers.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Fiscal responsibility appears likely to lose elections. Fiscal irresponsibility seems likely to win elections. spending political power to do something that the other side gains political power for undoing seems notably different from your football metaphor.
I'm a committed pacifist (in the style of the Amish), and I'm trying to raise the kids to also be pacifists.
There's a reason there's no Oakland Amish. This is not an argument against the values described, just a note on their evident limitations. Pacifism works when you live with other committed pacifists. Distance can replace walls and spears.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Because taking on sovereign debt is borrowing from your children and incurring a obligation upon generations yet unborn for your personal benefit.
If the alternative is someone else borrowing from my children for their personal benefit, it seems to me that borrowing myself is the better option. At least then I might be able to accrue something they might inherit.
If great men are those who plant trees who will shade those long after they are gone, then the weak man consumes those fruits, and leaves the future to the harsh light of the unforgiving sun.
I would be happy to plant trees to shade my children. I am not particularly interested in planting trees whose shade I am confident my children will never see.
Appeals to nebulous benefits are nebulous. Rather than platitudes, why not lay out a concrete case for how your preferred actions are likely to make the world better in a concrete way? Would that not be far more persuasive?
The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was not a "deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself".
The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was the widespread belief among Progressives that police kill large numbers of innocent Black men.
This belief was explicitly false, but became widespread among Progressives specifically because a large percentage of Journalists spent many years collaborating together to bias their reporting in a way calculated to create this impression, or in the parlance, "raise awareness". Widespread criticism of this practice was uniformly ignored.
And of course, the direct result of the riots was many thousands of additional Black people murdered by overwhelmingly Black criminals, as law enforcement broke down and the criminals ran rampant. This was the easily-predictable result of the riots, and it was in fact predicted in advance, by myself and many others. I observe that Blues, having been most vociferous in their support of the Black Lives Matter campaign when it was sparking riots based on a fictitious epidemic of Black murder, now studiously deploy the squid ink when the topic of the factual consequences of that campaign is raised. "Black Lives Matter" was a slogan to them, not anything resembling a principle.
The term seems appropriate.
Despite what this poster and the average LA resident might think, Red Tribers are only de facto second-class citizens in Blue enclaves, not de jure. According to the actual laws in the actual law books, they are still entitled to the protections afforded by the law, and to having the laws enforced on those who break them.
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